Friday, November 07, 2008

Well it looks like we had a landslide victory for the choice I probably would have chosen myself. And I sure don’t blame anyone for going with the winning option, however, it does make for little content for me to ramble on about this month.

Looking back at that one I could have changed the last choice to “All of the above” and gotten almost the same results huh? Still I can’t disagree with the winner.

Let us try something new then. Recently Apple has released the 4 GB Nano which supports a spoken interface. And many of the leading Screen Readers have offered either free updates or third party scripts for iTunes access. The question is now.. is Apple too late? With Milestones, Plextalks, Olympias and that juggernaut known as the Victor Reader, has Apple done enough to get you on board with everyone else who doesn’t already own a Zune? Personally I use my ARCHOS 604 often because it has a very large screen and I can customize the way that the text and backgrounds look. But how do the rest of you feel about the options you have for MP3 playback?

November’s Poll Question: My MP3 Player Of Choice Is..

The New Apple 4 Gig NanoThe Victor Reader StreamThe Icon/PAC Mate/Braille Sense/Braille or Voice NoteRockbox Enabled PlayersSome Other Accessible PlayerI Use An Off The Shelf MP3 Player With No Assistance

I know this is a lot like a poll we did before, however, we never had Apple as a real contender before. So we will see where this one takes us.

7 In 09: I don’t know how many times I have told AT Companies in the last year that 7 was coming and it was coming fast. And I did gloat a little with some of my contacts in the biz last week as many of them were heading off to Microsoft HQ to discuss 7 accessibility. But, as I have said here on the blog, 7 is coming and like I thought it is coming in 2009 for at least the Business and Enterprise crowds. We may even see a Public Beta before the close of 08. Now I wish I had the nerve to make all those bets I was offered. I’d be cleaning up so well..

A New Bar To Task: 7 is going to support many new features from its sister product Microsoft Office. And like the Ribbon in Office 07, a great many of these changes won’t have a “Classic Mode”. The new Taskbar is one of these features that won’t be modifiable to what we know in the Blindness Community as 9x mode or XP mode. MS has some solid research for why they are going in this route and in this Ars article some of the reasons why are explained.

And that’s not all. Keep checking FS for the soon to be released Open Book update as well. Add this to the PAC Mate 6.1 update and SARA update and you can easily see that those people at Freedom Scientific are busy little bees indeed.